Patrick Caulfield valuation

Patrick Caulfield was born in London in 1936, worked at Crosse & Blackwell before national service, and studied at Chelsea and the Royal College, where he overlapped with Hockney and Kitaj. He disliked being called a Pop artist and the objection was reasonable: the subjects are pipes, pottery, lobsters, foyers and dim restaurant interiors rather than consumer culture, and the debt is as much to Gris and Leger as to advertising. The method is flat unmodulated house-paint colour bounded by a uniform black line, into which he would occasionally drop one passage of photographic realism as a deliberate shock. He designed for the theatre and made major public commissions before his death in 2005.

Caulfield is one of the most collected British printmakers of his generation, and screenprints published by Waddington and by Kelpra Studio form the bulk of what comes to market, in editions typically of seventy-five to two hundred, signed and numbered in pencil. Colour fading is the principal enemy of these sheets and a faded impression is worth a fraction of a fresh one, so light history matters enormously. The paintings, in acrylic on canvas or board, are far scarcer and are unique.

Caulfield's best-known print project is Some Poems of Jules Laforgue, published by Petersburg Press in association with Waddington Galleries in 1973: the French poet's verse with twenty-two screenprints, each titled from a line of the poems. It began in the late 1960s, when he was invited to make a set of screenprints for a limited edition book and chose Laforgue.

A separate suite of six of the screenprints, each signed and numbered, was issued alongside the book. Single sheets from broken-up copies of the book also come to market, so a framed Laforgue print may be a page from the book or an impression from the signed suite, and a signature and number on the sheet itself are what show the second. His other screenprints were published in recorded editions, and an impression should match the published size and edition.